Voting

At least two weeks after the RFC, and once problems brought up in discussion have been resolved by modifying the proposal, send out a (Request for Voting) to tagging@openstreetmap.org mailing list[2].

Subject Line: "Feature Proposal - Voting - (Feature Name)"

Set the status=Voting, voteStartDate=<today> and voteEndDate=<today +14>. (Always use the date-format YYYY-MM-DD)

At this point there must be only one proposal on the page, which should not be changed anymore, so it's clear what is being voted on.

If you don't get enough votes/feedback after two weeks, the voting-period should be extended and perhaps you should send out a second mail to the list

Don't just vote "oppose". Give a reason/suggestions why you oppose the proposal. All suggestions should be taken into account before a proposal is approved or rejected.

Approved or rejected

At the end of the voting period, if the proposal has found enough support, the status can be set to "Approved" and the feature may be promoted to Post-vote clean-up.

A rule of thumb for "enough support" is 8 unanimous approval votes or 15 total votes with a majority approval, but other factors may also be considered (such as whether a feature is already in use).

Before you decide to reject a proposal because of lack of support, it may be worthwhile to send out a new vote request to the mailing list[3].

If the vote fails, the status can be set to "Rejected" and you should do the Post-vote clean-up.

Any proposals that have a 3 month inactive history should be set to "Abandoned" and the table-entry should be moved to Abandoned_features.

No !, an inactive proposal doesn't mean automatically that the tag is bad or completely abandoned, it just means that the proposal didn't go to the end of the process and is not being currently worked on. Many tags with the status 'abandoned' are used daily in OSM.

A new page for the feature should be created and the relevant map features template (depending on whether it is a key, a value, or a relation) should be applied. Follow the standard set by the Key:highway key and its values.

Do not remove entries from Map Features even if your new feature that has been voted on is intended to replace them. It is not considered good style to remove things from Map Features while they are still in use. You can remove things from Map Features if they are not in use.

For rejected features:

Note any reasons why rejected on the feature proposal page.

Add the feature to the listing on the Rejected features page, using the template (see the existing entries for an example).

Remove the template entry for the feature from the listing on the Proposed features page.

Rejected features may be resubmitted, modified, and moved back to the RFC process.

Non proposed features

Even if OSM has a completely free data model(that is, you don't need anyone's permission), we try to moderate the Map features list for several reasons:

landing page for newbies: so it has to be clear and self-explanatory in every language

avoid feature conflicts: during a vote all eyes can keep duplicates away

keep list/categories short: even a design decision, we want to avoid an uncontrolled explosion of features and keys